And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

I did a lot of work in Detroit in the 1990s, at a time when the town had bottomed out and was just beginning to show some signs of life. I returned last week for the reopening of a civic landmark, the Michigan Central Station, which has now been restored and reborn as an incubator for tech startups. What I found was a city that is very much on the comeback. A driving force behind all that is Mayor Mike Duggan, who for ten years has been the city's indefatigable leader, booster and idea machine. I sat down with Mayor Duggan to talk about his story and Detroit's. Mr. Mayor, it's great to see you. I think I saw you probably 30 years ago.

Good to have you back in town.

It's great to be back in town. And it's an extraordinary experience, honestly. And we'll talk about more about that later. I also appreciate. I know you were probably partying late into the night last night. You, you guys inaugurated the new Central Michigan Station, or the old Central Michigan Station, and we'll talk more about that, too. But just explain briefly what that is.

Yeah. Well, last night started with Diana Ross and finished with Eminem, so that's about as big as it gets. But the train station was, for my parents generation and my grandparents generation. I grew up in Detroit. It was the gateway to Detroit. In the first half of the last century, everybody came here. The freeways weren't very well built out. Air travel wasn't nearly as prevalent as it was. And so everybody from those generations remembers coming out of the train to this magnificent station and then into what was a beautiful city of Detroit. When the train stopped running in the 1980s, it was abandoned. Every single window broken out, covered with graffiti. Last night, one of the folks asked the audience, how many of you been to a rave party in the train station? I mean, this is all kinds of illicit activity. To see it restored by Ford Motor Company to the beauty of the early 1900s was just a very powerful thing for residents of the city.

Yeah. And really a metaphor for what's been happening in Detroit. And again, we'll we'll talk about that. But I want to talk about your parents, and your grandparents, who, it was sort of your typical immigrant story. They came from Ireland and I guess Italy. Is that.

Yeah. And so my great grandfather had a blacksmith shop on Michigan Avenue about a half mile up from the train station in the late 1800s. At the same time, Bill Ford's great grandfather was in the same neighborhood. We laugh about that. And.

Now who did better, I don't know.

Well, yeah. So his great grandfather went into cars and mine was shoeing horses. And my great grandfather ended up working for his great grandfather at the model T plant. But we've left that, the family fortunes have diverged ever since. But, you know, my dad, you know, was just, loved the city, grew up here. And and I spent lots and lots of time with my grandma coming downtown. I remember the train station. Detroiters remember a spectacular Hudson's building.

Yeah.

Where you came, you came down for Sanders fudge and then all of the movie theaters. This was a magical place. Yeah. And over the years, Detroiters have watched everything being taken away from us. The auto plants moved out. Then the movie theaters moved out. Then your neighbors moved out.

You moved out.

'And my my parents moved out. I moved back. My parents moved out, when I was a kid. And my father never thought he'd see the day that--my kids have come back to the city. That he, that when he moved out in the 60s, he never thought he'd see his grandkids moving back. But that's what's happened.

Yeah. You know, you describe those scenes. I worked, and you worked, on the stadium initiatives in the '90s, which actually have been part of the renaissance of downtown Detroit. And I remember recording interviews with people who talked about their memories of childhood and coming downtown and going to Hudson's, and, and it was moving. You know, and saying, we I want that back. I want, you know, which which is in many ways, you've, I mean, obviously, Detroit is a contemporary city, and it has, it's different, but there's activity again. Again, we'll get to that. But I want to just get back to your youth in Livonia, a suburb of Detroit. Your folks were sort of involved in politics, but in different ways.

Well, my father was a judge at state court for ten years and got appointed to the federal bench.

Had a run for the the court ship in the first instance.

Right. He got appointed by a governor, Governor Milliken, a Republican governor, for ten years and had to run for reelection, then was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan, where he served for 30 years. So I grew up in a Republican household. My father always said the worst day of his life was when I came home from college, told him I was a Democrat. And my mother worked in.

At least you went to a state school. He didn't throw all the money away.

'Exactly, exactly. And my mother worked in city government in the social services side of things. But I went to high school in Detroit, took the bus into Catholic Central High School in Detroit, and was in the city when the first African-American mayor, Coleman Young, was elected. And watch the reaction of my African-American classmates, which was enormously powerful on what that election meant. And.

Yeah, I've been involved in a few like that.

Yeah. And of course, you were. You were deeply involved with Mayor Archer and and his time here. But it was a formative experience. But but as you talk about the stadiums, you know, the Lions moved out of Detroit. That was unthinkable and heartbreaking. Then the Pistons moved out to the suburbs. And there was always a feeling among Detroiters for decades. Nobody cared. Nobody in the statehouse cared. Nobody in the federal government cared. Nobody in the corporate community cared. They just kept bailing on the city. And it's felt that way for a long time.

Your mother, I mean, someone might have predicted that you would end up in politics, because you were running around Livonia singing campaign songs for Ed McNamara, who was the mayor of, he was running for mayor of Livonia, then ultimately became the county executive. Your mother worked for him. And you. And he ended up being, like, a formative person in your life, a mentor, a sponsor.

Well, he, I was his campaign manager. I started out when I was seven years old. My father ran for district judge in Livonia, and I was passing out fliers door to door, and and we would get two hamburgers and a milkshake at Bates for four hours of work, which we thought was great compensation. So I started out at an early age. My father didn't win. I learned how to deal with defeat at an early age as well. But as I came along, I had been a county attorney, ran Ed McNamara's campaign for county executive. And when he won, he made me his his deputy county executive, which some people questioned. I was 28 years old, and I had 5,000 people reporting to me. But he was willing to put up with the mistakes until I figured out what I was doing.

And we should point out he he served in that role for 15 or 16 years. 16 years? He, he helped launch not just your career, but Jennifer Granholm's career, who became the, attorney general of the state, the governor of the state. Now, U.S. Secretary of Energy.

I hired Jennifer Granholm right out of law school, gave her first job working for the county. And she was our chief attorney at one point before she became attorney general. Now, we're very proud of the job she's doing as secretary of energy. But a lot of young folks. Ed McNamara was an amazing politician. If you've flown, in and out of the airport in Detroit, which is considered one of the most efficient in the world, he built that. I mean, literally from empty fields. It was his vision. And it's one of the benefits of being there for 16 years is that we built it up and built the runways and the new terminal and the roadways over a period of really several Republican and Democratic administrations in, in Washington. But he also gave a lot of young people a chance.

When he left, you ran for county prosecutor, you became county prosecutor. But I I'd be remiss if I didn't just jump back to your dad for a second. You must have been a huge Detroit Tigers fan when you were growing up.

Oh, yeah, I just. When I turned 16, at that point, I got out every game I wanted for a buck. You could sit in the bleachers. I'd take my younger brothers with me and we plopped down there night after night and afternoon after afternoon. And those were some, some really good years.

I raise it because you must have been paying rapt attention when they won the World Series in 1968.

I was there.

And and of course, the star of that team was Denny McLain.

Right.

Won 31 games that year for the Detroit Tigers. Your dad, as a federal court judge, ended up having to sentence Denny McLain to prison.

It was even worse than that. Denny had become a very successful talk show host after his first stint in prison. And, and I was on his show as a deputy county executive. Denny and I were very good friends. And then he got caught up in in his meat packing pension issue. My my father sentenced him a second time the week he got out. He came by to see me, brought me a couple of autographed baseballs and says, no hard feelings about your dad. So, but Denny is one of a kind.

He also, I should point out, your dad, he was involved in a number of important decisions, and one of them was upholding the affirmative action program at the University of Michigan. Because we have a Supreme Court now that has taken a different view. But that was a huge decision.

'The Supreme Court indicated that they could use race as a factor. Of course, I went to the University of Michigan. I was influenced enormously by the diversity of students I experience there. It's something that that you can't write down on paper, but it changes your perspective. And my father's opinion was upheld at the time by a 5-4 opinion of the Supreme Court. It's it's been, reversed. But I was very proud of that ruling.

Why why did you become a Democrat then?

You know, you, again, your influence at, at Michigan is a pretty liberal place. But, like many things, the women I was with were feminists and the literature that I read in order to continue to have a social life lead that way. But I just became, you know, a believer in civil rights in, in women's rights and what the Democrats stood for. So my father, who went to all Catholic schools, he went Xavier undergrad and University of Detroit in law school. When I told him I was going to go to Michigan, he says, you can't go there. You're going to come back an atheist. And when I graduated, he told his friends, it's worse. He didn't come back an atheist. He came back a Democrat.

So let's talk about the, the county prosecutor's role. You did it for one term. You were an aggressive prosecutor in that you seized drug houses. You you went after gun crimes. You started a unit to review police shootings. And I'm wondering what your view of the debates about how county prosecutors should operate today are, because you have a sort of a battle between the left and more centrist Democrats about, you know, things like, cash free bond and, and whether relatively minor crimes should be prosecuted. And, you know, now you see a backlash to that. We've seen it in Portland. We've seen it in San Francisco. Chicago just elected a more centrist prosecutor. How are you watching all of that through the eyes of someone who actually held one of those job?

Well, well, I never wavered when the defund the police protest started. I said, we are not defunding the police in the city of Detroit. I have yet to be in a community meeting where anybody in Detroit neighborhoods say I want fewer cops. The people who were arguing for that were completely out of touch,with Detroiters. But when I was the prosecutor, when I got elected in 2000, Detroit had the highest rate of civilian shootings of any police department in America. You had one guy, Eugene Brown, who's still famous here, who shot eight different people.

You're talking about by police officers, by.

Police officer, eight different people. He shot as an officer and was cleared in every single case. And so when I got elected, the first thing I did was say for every officer involved shooting scene, I'm sending prosecutors to the scene and we are going to run an independent investigation, which infuriated the Detroit police union and the police chief at the time. But when you're on the scene, you see witnesses, you see all kinds of things. And an interesting thing started to develop. In some cases, we prosecuted the cops. In many cases, we cleared the cops, because they'd acted appropriately. But the anger in the city started to calm down, because all people want is the truth. But the problems in the department were so deeply ingrained that Mayor Dennis Archer asked the Justice Department to come in and put the Detroit Police Department under a consent order, which would happen in 2003. We got out of the Justice Department oversight my first year as mayor in 2014, but that Justice Department consent agreement changed. The Detroit Police Department completely changed their use of force policies, change the the accountability of the officers. And when the protests erupted across this country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the city of Detroit did not have a single fire, did not have a single store looted. Our activists stood up and said to largely suburban protesters coming into our city, go home. This is not about the Detroit Police Department. It was a remarkable transformation. But there's a very strong relationship between the community and the police here. But Mayor Archer and the Justice Department actually deserve a lot of credit. And I've said this to a number of my fellow mayors who are looking at their potential Justice Department oversight is it can be a really good thing to change a culture of a bad department.

Absolutely. The I guess the question I was asking you is on this issue of what crime, how do you balance concerns about a, a justice system that often is much harder on the poor, much harder on people of, of color, I mean, statistically, and the need to maintain a sense of safety so that this issue of cashless bail, of prosecution of, of of lesser crimes, you know, shoplifting and things like that, giving judges more discretion. Where do you land on all of that?

'I think it has to be equitable. And when I was prosecutor, I saw this. I was very strong on prosecuting people who committed a crime with a gun. And there's a law in here. If you're a previous felon, commit a crime with a gun, it's a two year minimum mandatory sentence. I would say almost every single time I got a phone call saying, cut this guy a break, it was a Caucasian who had friends who were connected. And Saul Green was U.S. attorney. He told me the same thing. That that nobody ever called him about a poor black kid who was dealing drugs. Cut him a break. The system is, does tend to be biased. And we were extremely disciplined when I was a prosecutor. Make darn sure that that we didn't give in to those kinds of pressures. And today, I think our police department, of course, we have a tremendous police chief in James White. We have a prosecutor, Kym Worthy, who has a reputation as a very strong African-American woman who has fought hard for safety. I don't think we have the issues in Detroit, but I'll just tell you how I feel is we have, I have cracked down on graffiti. There used to be graffiti when I got elected, graffiti on everything in the city. You see almost none now. In the last two days, we just arrested the guy we call Beavis. He's been spray painting Beavises across the city and it costs a lot of money. We arrested him. He lived in.

Sounds more like a butthead, but anyway.

He is now a butthead. We arrested him. A white suburbanite living in Hazel Park who was.

Really?

Yeah, exactly. I would say 70, 80% of the graffiti arrests we've made have been white, suburban, sometimes white out staters who talk about their art. I said, well, if it's art, spray paint it on your own house in Hazel Park. Don't come into our city and spray paint up our town. And so when you say minor crimes, there is this attitude that it's only Detroit. We can trash it and we're entitled to and something we never dream of doing in our own neighborhood. So I'm very proud of the fact that we got a search warrant. We busted Beavis, found all kinds of Beavis stuff in his house and arrested him. But this is the kind of tone we set. And Detroiters are on my side on this issue. They don't think people should be coming into this town and spray painting it up.

Or people inside this town. You think.

It's surprisingly few from inside the town.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. You left that job after just four years?

Actually, three years.

To take a job as th, executive director of, the CEO of the Detroit Medical Center. Why?

When I had worked for Ed McNamara, I'd been deeply invested in extending indigent health care to working folks. It was a forerunner of Obamacare. But we structured a deal where the county paid a third, the employer paid a third, the employee paid a third. And we got 25,000 uninsured people who were getting insurance. And it was just a passion of mine and something I understood. I had been the prosecutor for three years. The Detroit Medical Center, it's hard to explain, what it means. It was the largest employer in Detroit with 14,000 employees. And in the city of Detroit, 300,000 people a year go to the Detroit Medical Center emergency rooms for treatment. So in a city of 700,000, 300,000 a year is everybody. A quarter of all the Medicaid patients in the state came through those hospitals. And the the DMC had announced they were closing Hudson Hospital, which handle all the high risk pregnancies. They were closing Receiving Hospital that hand handled 100,000 of the, of the emergency room runs for the uninsured, and the Karmanos Cancer Center. They had hired bankruptcy lawyers, and they were closing down, and they had offered the job to a number of qualified doctors and medical people who all said the place couldn't be saved. And they decided I had turned around some operations of the county, and they came and offered it to me. And I just felt like if I didn't take it, these hospitals were were literally going to close within months.

You and you stayed there for quite a while. What, ten years?

Nine years.

Nine years. And at the end of it, it became a for profit concern. Talk about that. What was the decision behind that.

So when I came in, the DMC had lost $100 million a year for five years out. $500 million. I think we had 14 days of cash on hand. And but when I came in, if you walked into our emergency rooms, it was three hours before you saw a doctor. And I said to the people who were there, you keep complaining about the federal government doesn't support me. The state government doesn't support me. They're not the reason people are sitting in the emergency room for three hours. And so I said, instead of closing, how about we upgrade our service? And so I made a commitment. I came in on January 1st. I said, by May 1st, everybody is going to be seen in the emergency room in 29 minutes or less because one of the suburbs promised 30. So I said, we're going to beat it. And if you don't, we're going to give you two tickets to a Tiger game, which Mike Ilitch was my friend, and the team had lost 104 games, so it was a really good deal he made me on those tickets. When we stopped talking about being broke and Medicaid and closing and everybody put their mind to service, we were seeing 95% of the patients in 29 minutes. People came back in a huge way. I started to get doctors to come back. We upgraded all of our hospitals, ended up with more hospitals nationally ranked in U.S. news and quality in any system except the University of Michigan. Ended up growing 3000 more employees. And everybody in the city, of course, how I got elected mayor, everybody in this city had a definite opinion on how I'd done running the the hospital system. But the fact that we had gone from almost bankrupt to not closing any hospitals but expanding was great. We were about to sell bonds for $150 million to do improvements, because our facilities were way out of date. We were competing, you know, we had kids with leukemia who were getting their chemo sitting on chairs in hallways. I mean, that's how outdated we were. We were still beating our competitors. But I wanted Detroiters to have the kind of first class facilities they deserve. So the folks at Merrill Lynch told me it was 100% sure we were going to have $150 million bond sale next week. And the next week, Lehman Brothers closed and Merrill Lynch almost went under.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, there was no ability for anybody to borrow anywhere. And so that's where we were. I had great board members like Roger Penske, and we're sitting here saying, we're still making money. I, DMC was the only hospital system in Michigan that didn't lay off during the Great Recession. That's how well that we were doing. But but Roger Penske said to me, you know, if you were a private company and you were putting up this kind of profitability year after year at these conditions, you'd have huge investors. This whole thing is a nonprofit where all you can do is do 30 million, you know, 30 year long term bonds where nobody will loan? he says, if we want to put money into this place, we should think about being private. And so we went private. We got what was then an outstanding group out of Nashville called Vanguard, put $850 million and rebuilt all of the emergency rooms. Put a new heart hospital at Harbor. Rebuilt children's hospital. It was phenomenal. But we did it because it was the only way to build the kind of first class facilities that we needed. Now, the way it's operating today is not what I would have hoped. But at the time. And this was before Obamacare passed. So if I had know Obamacare was going to pass in Detroit, Medical Center would become enormously profitable because all the people weren't being paid for were covered. If I had known a year later Obamacare was going to pass, we would not have gone private. I probably would have stayed at DMC, and would have bought everybody else. But, it it it worked out the way it worked out.

And are there metrics that suggest what the improvements that you brought meant in terms of health care outcomes in the city?

In the short term, they were terrific. There's a new owner now, unfortunately, Tenet out of Dallas that doesn't have the same commitment to quality that we had back then. So I don't know about that the health outcomes are there. An interesting thing has happened. Henry Ford Hospital, which was my arch rival when I was running DMC.

Not anymore. Now you're their, you're their biggest ally.

They are by doctors and my allies. They're building a $2 billion facility with Michigan State University. And, and building one of the finest hospitals anywhere in the Midwest. So it's the nature of the ebbs and flows of hospital systems. But right now, there's no doubt medical care in the city is better, largely because there's a lot more primary care sites because of Obamacare. You could actually, as a doctor, get paid for seeing people who previously had been uninsured. And so, so health care is better, not necessarily because of Detroit Medical Center, but I think because of Obamacare.

'You talk about turnarounds, you decide to run for mayor in 2014. And I remember, because and this is when you and I first met. I worked for Dennis Archer in 1993 and 97 when he ran for reelection. And I remember driving around the city with him when I first started working for him. And he was running the first time. He had been a state Supreme Court judge, he gave that up to, and, we passed vacant home after vacant home. Empty lot after empty lot. Streetlights were routinely in disrepair. Poverty obviously rampant. Downtown was largely gutted in many ways. I mean, it was dead. And I said to him, why d,o why do this? Why do you want to do this? I was really interested in knowing, because it was useful in terms of conveying that to others. And, you know, he was very impassioned about not giving up on the city. And he knew there was a future. And he did make a difference. He was there for the stadium initiatives. He improved services. Not every mayor after him was as good. But here you are, a white guy in a city that is overwhelmingly African-American, 77% today.

83% at the time I ran. Yeah.

'I mean, you had a residency issue because you were moving into the city to run. You actually won, on a write-in at that time. But did it give you pause? The idea of being a white mayor in an overwhelmingly Black city? And what caused you to decide to run?

'Running for mayor had never crossed my mind. But the greatest job I ever had was running the Detroit Medical Center. You get to go to work every day with people who chose a career to help others. When you go to work with nurses, patient care assistants, these folks every day. It is a it is a joy. And we turn that system around by basically saying that we are going to deliver just as good or better care in the city of Detroit than anybody gets in the suburbs. I'm not going to accept a lower standard. It was the culture change that made the the Detroit Medical Center turn around. And as the city headed toward bankruptcy under Mayor Bing, I went out one night, left the hospital at 6:00 on a winter night, and the streetlights were out. Now, I'm trying to get suburbanites to come to our hospital, but nobody's going to come if they think their families afraid to drive down and visit them. I was just so aggravated. But the African-American employees at the DMC kept coming up to, to me saying, you need to move to Detroit and run for mayor. Qhich when I first heard, it was a craziest idea I'd ever heard. But when you think about it, if there's one place in America where we've started to overcome the the terrible racial divisions in this country, it's urban hospitals. Doesn't matter if the patient coming in is Black or white, doesn't matter if the doctors and the nurses are Muslim or Christian. You you see each other as people first and as stereotype second. And what the employees were saying to me was if people in Detroit could get to know you the way we did, you would be elected the mayor. And at some point, I just said, the way the city is going, we were headed toward bankruptcy at the time. I decided to run. We were in bankruptcy before I got elected. People were moving out at the rate of a thousand a month. There were 45,000 abandoned houses. It was hopeless. And I felt like I had some abilities, that could turn the city around. And I felt like if the people of Detroit wanted to elect me, this was the city I was born in, and I'd give it a try.

And how how did you approach? I want to get a sense of what you were thinking. How do you. It's like, how do you tackle, a situation that has so many different manifestations and so many different challenges? How you organize your your plan of attack? Go back to the first days when you walked into City Hall.

Well, to start with, on plan of attack was organized in the way I campaign, which is I was running against the most popular African American official in Southeast Michigan, Sheriff Benny Napoleon. When I got in the race, nobody thought I had a chance. At the end of the day, I won by a significant margin. But the way I campaign was, I said to Detroiters, invite me into your house and I'll show up. And so people invited me and I'd sit in a living room, 6 or 8 people, and the next night it'd be 10 or 12 people. And eventually it got to be 100 people. We had to move to restaurants and churches, but I sat in homes. And you want to get past our historic racial distrust, sit with people, break bread with them, listen to their histories, share mine. But I knew what Detroiters needed. I understood why folks were moving out. I understood what they didn't like. We had a lot of people who didn't want to leave. And so, I had a plan. And you got 45,000 abandoned houses. You got to clear out the blight. When most of the streetlights in the city are out, you damn well better turn on the street lights. And so I started the same way I did at the medical center where I made people, like, actually see people in the emergency room timely. If you were in my cabinet meetings that first year, there were metrics on the wall. We only had eight working ambulances in the city every week. They had to report how many preventive maintenance checks they did on the ambulances till we got up to 40 being operated. We how many buses went out?

Because there were there was like a ridiculous response time.

Oh it was, it was an hour. It was, it was, it was. In this city in 2013, you put somebody in the back of the car and you drove them to the hospital. You did not wait for the ambulance. It was typically an hour to show up. And these were the reasons that the the massive population loss was occurring. And unfortunately, and along with the the real estate recession that put people's houses underwater, people walked away from beautiful houses in these neighborhoods. They had a $200,000 mortgage on a house they couldn't sell for $50,000. And so we had burned out houses in this city. We also had a lot of beautiful houses in the city that people had had walked away from. And so I said to the neighbors, look, I'm going to target the demolitions at the best neighborhoods. The Neighborhoods where 80 to 90% of the houses are occupied. I'm going to knock down the burned out one, but I'm going to take the nice one and put it on a website that we're going to sell, like eBay, and we will auction off the houses. And today. We started at 45,000. Now we have 5,000 left, actually 4,000 as of this month left. We've knocked down 25,000. But we've had 15,000 vacant houses get fixed up and had families move into them. And this is the real hope. When you see that house and you now have a new neighbor, you're now calling your your friends and your relatives, and that other vacant house on the street. Somebody wants to come and buy and move in.

You also did something with the abandoned lots, right? Talk about that. You incentivize communities to do things with these lots.

So the Land Bank, when I came in, owned 45,000 abandoned houses and 90,000 vacant lots. And if you wanted to buy a vacant lot in Detroit, it took a formal vote of Detroit City Council. You had to be the most tenacious person in the world that that side lot that had been empty next to your house for eight years that you've been cutting the grass out every week to actually get title to it. And so I had a fight with City Council, but I said, I want to do something that says, if you own the house next door and you're current on your taxes, you go online, you pay us 100 bucks, and we'll send you the deed. And that was kind of a radical idea. We started off with fairs, and you'd come out to a high school gym and, say the side lots are up for sale. Hundreds of people would show up. And it was powerful to have, you know, a 84 year old man came up to me, his cane, he had his deed in his hand. He said, Will you take your picture with me? And I said, sure. How long did it takes? He said, two hours. I say, I feel really bad. He says, oh no, I've been cut in this lot for ten years. When I got up this morning, I told my wife I was going up to the high school to get the deed, and she said, you're such a fool. They're not going to give you a deed to that lot. He says, I want to take her a picture of me and the mayor and my deed when I go back. And that's what happened.

And what did folks do with those lots?

60,000 have now been sold. They are swing sets and they are gardens. And they enlarge their yards because, as you know, Detroit's a whole lot of little houses built for for the expansion of the auto industry back in the the first half of the last century. Now they have bigger lots. These side lots have been put to beautiful use across the city. But if you stayed, you love the fact you could buy that lot next door for $100, and now it's yours.

This obviously is a major. These things you're talking about are major concerns to neighborhoods across the city. There's a criticism that you hear and you hear it. I mean, there's been an absolute transformation of downtown Detroit. I was here, my my wife and I were here last night. We, walked around. We had a great dinner. We. And the whole feel is so different than I remember 30 years ago. I think if you look at cities around the country, cities that have vibrant center cities are cities that are on the move and are able to grow. But you still have complaints that, about gentrification and about the focus is too much on downtown, not on the neighborhoods. How do you respond to it?

Yeah, well, the University of Michigan, that that that complaint comes from non Detroiters largely. The University of Michigan did a study earlier this year that Detroiters, black Detroiters, have gained $3 billion in wealth and the increase in their home values in the ten years that I've been mayor. There are 600 block clubs who are enormously proud, the way these neighborhoods came back. And nationally for the last six months, we have been leading Miami and San Diego as the most rapidly appreciating home sale prices in America. And it took a lot of steps to get there. It took the new street lights, it took getting rid of the abandoned houses. It took new parks, but it took partnerships with neighborhoods. And again, I am. I don't know if you have anybody who's foght gentrification more than I am. The definition of gentrification is people of lower income being pushed out by people of higher income. That absolutely has not happened in Detroit. What we have done is taken 15,000 abandoned houses and move families into them. We aren't pushing anybody out, and that has raised the property values. And all the folks who stayed. We just finished $1 billion in new affordable housing in the last five years. Because we are going to be a city where people of all incomes can live in all neighborhoods. And I think there is enormous pride in our neighborhood associations and block clubs with the way their neighborhoods have come back.

I want to ask you about some specific initiatives of yours that I found interesting. One is the development with a police chief of a mental health unit within the police department. So many of these very fraught scenes between police and citizens often are with people who are suffering from mental illness. Tell me what you guys have done about that.

'We have a barricaded gunman a week. What's happened here, and the homicides are, you know, at 60-year lows, shootings are down dramatically. You know, 15, 20 years ago, a lot of the violent activity was gangs and drug turf. Now it is beefs between people, and beefs between people where one is mentally ill turn violent in a hurry. We have a remarkable police chief, James White, who has a master's degree in mental health counseling and is a professional mental health counselor. And he came to me about two years ago and he said, you know, the mental health system in this state is failing. We don't have long term secure treatment beds. We don't have access to preventive care. He says I want to set up a mental health division with the police department. And he brought me a proposal to create these units where basically a, two cops would go out with a mental health professional. And we had to reorient dispatch, because you have to dispatch the right car, but they call them co-response teams. And now when we have a call for a violently mentally ill person, which happens probably 4 or 5 times a week, we send out the co-response team who aren't in police uniforms, who aren't in red and blue flashing lights, who come out in a way that is very calming, and they're having just extraordinary results. Every case is unpredictable. But they're having extraordinary results in resolving them, not just with with no shootings with the officers, but preventing suicides in in large numbers of cases. It's been it's been terrific.

You also initiated a free community college policy in the city. Talk about that, about the relationship between education and unemployment. And how are the schools preparing young people for for the two years of community college? Do they arrive there ready to perform?

Well, the Detroit Public Schools in Detroit are not under the mayor. They're under a separately elected school board. I think Dr. Vitti, the superintendent, is doing a good job. But their progress was interrupted dramatically by Covid. And as you know, across the country. In Michigan, when they shut down the schools for Covid, the first school district shut down were Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, Birmingham. It turned out those school districts were semi online anyway. Students were turning in their, homework by email. They were emailing their teachers at night, etc. In Detroit we had to buy with with charitable money from the corporations, laptops and hot spots for our students just to be able to continue online learning. And then we realized that teachers had no training in an online curriculum. But they're coming back now. We're seeing signs of progress on the, what I call adult scholarships. It was made possible by Joe Biden and the American Rescue Plan. And and $827 million was made available to Detroit, which has accelerated our recovery dramatically. But we went to to our folks and said, you think about your kids getting a college scholarship. You might be making $12 an hour washing dishes. You never got a high school degree. We'll pay you $10 an hour to go to your high school classes. We'll pay you to be trained to be a truck driver, to be a brick mason, to be an electrical worker, to be a tech worker. And we'll do it part time so you can keep making your money. Because you need to buy diapers and to put food on the table. But we're going to raise your skill level. And it has been just very powerful. The unemployment rate in the city has gone from 20% to 7%. But I'm going after that last 7%, which, by and large, our folks in many cases don't have a high school degree. Some cases, can't read at an eighth grade level. We are actually raising the skills of our residents so that they will be able to earn good incomes for a long period of time.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. Talk about entrepreneurism and the, what you call the Motor City Match and the impact that that has had.

So Motor City Match, this comes from when I was campaigning and just sitting in living rooms, and I heard from one entrepreneur after another that their friends in the suburbs had parents and family members who could give them a check and get them started on their businesses, but they didn't have that kind of money in their family. And so we started something that started with philanthropy, where we set aside $500,000 a quarter and we had a citywide match, our citywide competition, that we do ten grants of up to $50,000 to start your business. We'd have 300 applicants every quarter. And we realized that we had to add things like help running business plans, help finding locations. But we started awarding ten a quarter, and everybody knew it was every single quarter. If you lost in the third quarter 2014 because you didn't have enough finance skills, you could finance a, find a finance partner and come back in the second quarter of 2015. Today, we have 165 businesses open in the city, and in almost every case, they pulled plywood off a vacant storefront with businesses that are growing and thriving because of Motor City Match. Now we've got another a number of cities that are copying this. But it's become tremendously popular as part of a whole ecosystem here that says, and I've had people move from New York, people move from Chicago, who say, I can start my business in Detroit a lot cheaper with a lot more support than where I came from.

I will not ask for rebuttal time on behalf of my hometown, but we're sitting here in the New Lab, right across the street from the the train station, the revitalized building that we spoke about earlier. Talk to me about what happens in this building and what's happening across the street, what is happening tangibly, and what does it represent?

'This is Bill Ford's vision. But the building you and I are sitting in for decades was the book depository for the Detroit Public Schools where they stored the textbooks. Then it caught on fire in the 70s and has been abandoned since. When Bill Ford said Apple and Google, this is ten years ago, apple and Google are supposed to be the cars of the future, and Silicon Valley is going to take over the future of the auto industry from Detroit. That was the whole national narrative ten years ago. I was deeply engaged with with GM and Ford and Stellantis about Detroit has to stay the future. And so Bill Ford said, I'm not going to get the engineers, the software talent that we need to compete with Silicon Valley in a traditional corporate headquarters. I want a place where we're going to design the electrical and autonomous vehicles of the future. It's going to be a different campus. And he was looking at Silicon Valley, he was looking in and in the Ann Arbor area near the University of Michigan. And I said, Bill, you need to look at Detroit. Because while the kids may graduate from the University of Michigan, they don't want to live in Ann Arbor. They want to live in Detroit when they graduate. And he said, all right, I'll put it in the in the mix. He called me a couple months later and he said, I've got the perfect place. I'm going to take the train station, but not just the train station. We're going to build out an entire campus. He says, I'm going to take that book depository building abandoned next door and it's going to be a place for startups where anybody involved in mobility can come and start a company. And so he made this campus broader than Ford, and it's amazing. This building is filled with a hundred startups from around the world in mobility. And now folks who maybe have access to venture capital easier in other places in the country, and I got, I need to fix that, are coming here because of the support system. But, for example, 14th Street that you came on to, to get here is the only public street in America that is a self-charging street. We have the inductive coils under the street so that if you park your electric vehicle, it's got an adapter. It'll charge while it parks on the street. I didn't do that because I want a bunch of people parking on the street. But in this building, anybody who's working on self-charging adapters or batteries can take it out on the street and test it out. This is what we're creating here in the city of Detroit. And why, you know, we're back to being the center of the auto industry of the future.

I can't have a whole conversation with you without talking a little politics. Because as good a mayor as you are, I've known you a long time, and I know you're pretty good at politics, so I want I want to talk to you about this presidential race. A lot of the initiatives that you're talking about are very much on the ballot in this election. So, and I know you've been very close to the president, and you have a big stake in this election. Michigan is one of the decisive states that Joe Biden must win. And right now, I know you've been dismissive of polling, but there's been a torrent of it. This is a tough race, and if you talk to people off the record, they'll tell you that, that this is a tough race here in Michigan. Tell me what your assessment is.

It's going to be very close. There's no question about it. And in Detroit, there's no doubt that it is overwhelmingly for President Biden. When he was vice president, he was here every six months. He helped us get money to demolish the abandoned houses. He helped us get money for the busses. He came and did backyard barbecues in in East English Village. And he and I became very personally close during that time. At one point, I was in a meeting where President Obama said, Joe's problem is he thinks he's the vice president of Detroit. But that's how much time he was he was spending here. And Detroiters are enormously, you know, grateful and loyal. But statewide, we've got the same dynamics we've got going in a lot of other places. Trump's been very effective with this culture war stuff. The Democrats have bought into it in a way that's been very damaging. And it's going to be very close.

'What should. Well, first of all, let me ask you two questions. One is, one of the problems that is persistent across the country has been disillusionment among younger African-American voters and particularly young men. And this shows up in focus group after focus group, poll after poll. You have conversations on the street as you must, and you hear it. Why is that? And what does Biden need to do to get those people maybe not voting for? Maybe they won't vote for Trump, as the polls suggest. The question is, will they vote?

Yeah, I don't think they'll vote for Trump. But the question is right.

The couch. You're running against the couch.

'And so, I, you know, I think about 2016 and I was out in front of shopping centers trying to get people to register to vote when Hillary Clinton was running. And and the lack of interest shocked me. And the attitude was, if Barack Obama couldn't change my life as a young African-American man after eight years, what's Hillary Clinton going to do that's any better? And I'd say, do you want Donald Trump to be president? And maybe you could get him to register based on and some of the kind of statements he makes and the David Duke endorsement and a lot of those things. But the question is for people who still feel left out of the economy. You know, if I still haven't been connected by now, how will I be connected? And that's the question that is going to decide whether people participate or whether they stay home. And certainly in Detroit, you know, I'm talking about the scholarships that people have now. A lot of times, and this is the American Rescue Plan has put money into cities in a great way. A lot of mayors are taking credit for all the improvements, and people have no idea Joe Biden did that new recreation center, did that school improvement. And I don't think that's, you know, I think that's not helping. We need to we need to tell people that there are two choices, and there are two visions of this country. And when Donald Trump was there, they took the housing money and steered it to the newer suburban parts of the country and took it away from, from cities. And that elections have consequences.

One of the things that I've said and concerns me is that there's been a big focus on what Biden has done and, I actually did a podcast with Nancy Pelosi. And she said, you know what? You, people really don't think that way. They want to know what you're going to do. They want to know what's at stake. Don't you think we need a little more, you know, to hear a little more of that?

For sure? For sure. And of course, the 2016 campaign was a classic example of nobody was told what you were going to do next. It it caused a lot of people to stay home. And so there's no doubt, he needs to do that.

And I mean, I mean, mayor, on a lot of the things that you're talking about, you can either build forward and, and add, and chart a tangible path that will touch people. Or in many cases, Trump is promise to repeal the things that have already been done. You know, so I'm just, I'm, I care as much about democracy as anybody on the planet. I'm not sure. And I've said many times, if you have to worry about the food on, you're, paying for the food on your table, you're probably not talking about democracy.

And, you know, I've been involved in a number of millage campaigns, over the years. If you were on a millage saying if you don't pass this, you're going to lose what you got, you lose your millage campaign. People want to know, what am I going to get next? And that's the ultimate message for any successful campaign. And, I think the president has, a lot to talk about. In Michigan, of course, what's going on in the Middle East is just, hangs.

That was my next.

Hangs over every conversation.

'Explain why. There is a large Arab-American and Palestinian population around the Detroit metropolitan area.

'I would say that we have a huge Arab-American population, but it's more than that. You know, the Arab American population has been here for decades. And if you're under 30 in southeastern Michigan, you grew up with Arab American friends. Ramadan is a celebration. You've been at your friends house for the iftar dinner where they break the fast. This is. And the pain. And we have a whole lot of people in this area who have lost relatives in Gaza. The pain that your friends are feeling, you are feeling. And under the age of 30 in this state right now, we have a lot of people feeling pain. And that defines a lot of the feelings toward the president. And I'm hopeful that we're going to get hostages freed and a permanent ceasefire, which we need now. I'm hoping we get there. Hoping we solve these, these aid issues. But right now, it is a, it is a very much a defining issue here in southeast Michigan.

What if there isn't a ceasefire? What if this, you know, national security advisor to Netanyahu said recently he foresaw 6 or 7 months more of war. What would that mean here?

It depends on how the president handles it. And I think everybody is is very, watching very closely to see. You know, the the murder of the 1200 Israelis by the terrorists affected everybody deeply. But the death, just the other day in the school building in Gaza, affects everybody deeply, as well. And, and a lot of people here say we should feel just as much pain for the victims in Gaza as the people who died at the hands of Sinwar, who is a terrorist.

The the the head of Hamas, the military unit of Hamas.

Right. And so that's a factor that plays out here maybe more intensely than in other, other states.

Yeah. Congresswoman Talib is from this area. And very early on, she accused the president of abetting genocide. What was your reaction to that and how how has she impacted on?

Well, she never endorsed Joe Biden four years ago. And, even after he got the nomination. So I don't. I think everybody. I don't think that has any significant effect on people, I think is pretty much what is expected. People are going to watch the president to see what he does.

Yeah. I think it's such a hard situation because, you can hold two thoughts at once, which is, as you say, what happened on October 7th was a horrific act of terrorism and, you know, including rape and the mutilation of people and of children and so on, and still have empathy for the children of Gaza and still be concerned about the sort of indiscriminate use of force. I had Secretary Panetta on this last week and he was very critical of the Israeli military strategy, said it could be a lot more surgical, should have been aimed at getting the people who are responsible and not not with the use of these bombs and so on. Let me ask you about your own future. But also, before we get to that, there's going to be a presidential race in 2028. We don't know who's going to be president in 2028, but we know with reasonable certainty that there's going to be a presidential race in 2028. One of the, names that get mentioned often is Governor Whitmer, who you work closely with. Give me your assessment of her as a potential candidate.

She's an extraordinary talent. And, the more pressure she's under and the more that she's bullied, the stronger she gets. And we saw her leadership blossom during Covid and, and then under the attacks from then President Trump, but she's done an outstanding job here. And, she has got the kind of social media presence and instincts that I think will make her a very formidable candidate.

You think America will elect a woman in the near term?

I think the right woman. And if it's Gretchen Whitmer against Nikki Haley, it will definitely elect a woman.

Is that your forecast?

I don't I don't know, but, but I think, I think at this point, the country will pick the best candidate.

You finish, you'll be finishing your third term. Some of us who've worked for mayors who have been long term mayors would tell you that any term beyond the third term of becomes a lot more difficult for a variety of reasons. There's a governor's race coming up. She's term limited. Would you consider that?

Yeah. We'll see. This. You talk about third terms. There's a lot of mayors don't make it to their second term anymore. And I got elected to the last term with 75%. The people of the city have just been enormously supportive of me. So I'm going to make a decision about next year. And the question is, I know what I came here to accomplish. And I'm going to assess, did I did I do what I came here to do? And and that'll will determine whether I run again in 2025. And then after that, I'll figure out whether I want to run for another office or I want to go back to the private sector.

'So the discerning listener would say that is a non-answer answer, which is maybe.

You know, I am so focused right now on the presidential election, which is, as you say, can be very tough in Michigan. And, the day the presidential election is over, I'm going to focus on my own future. But right now, this city and this state would be so much better off if Joe Biden were the president. I'm just going to be continuing to focus on that.

Does the outcome of that election impact on your thinking about whether you want to continue in public life?

I don't think so. I'm just I'm a one at a time guy.

It would be a lot more challenging if it goes the other way.

You know, I, I survived four years of Trump, we kept our heads down and tried not to be, tried not to be noticed. But we could survive again. But it is so much easier. You look at the way the city's recovery has accelerated since Joe Biden has been president. The new rec centers, the new parks, the people being employed, the new, auto plans, etc. this city's recovery is so much faster under Joe Biden. I'm just going to be consumed by that until the election.

Well, mayor, I have to say it's been a revelation returning to Detroit. I've been here periodically, but just to look around. Susan, my wife, and I took a ride on the people mover around the downtown area and just to look around and see all these signs of life and beautiful things blossoming is a real tribute to the city and a tribute to your leadership. So congratulations on that.

It's a good time to be in Detroit, and I hope a lot of other folks will follow your lead and come visit.

Well, you know, our millions of listeners I'm sure are, as soon as they hear this, are going to make their plans and head here. So get ready. Thank you so much. Mayor Mike Duggan.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to the Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Licktieg, and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics Dot uChicago dot edu.